Life is finally returning to normal after a great week in Seattle for PASS Summit 2012. The entire year is basically other smaller events (still great events!) that occur to pass the time until Summit arrives. Like Ted Kummert said in the keynote on Wednesday PASS Summit is like a big family reunion.

Here’s a summary of how my week went:

Friday

I did my duty of Early Voting in Florida (I didn’t know then it would take Florida 5 days to announce it’s winner) before taking for an afternoon flight to Seattle. After landing in Seattle I drove with Bradley Schacht to meet several other Pragmatic Works employees for our companies annual hike up Mt. Rainier.

Saturday

We woke up early Saturday morning and began our hike up Mt Rainier. The weather was less than ideal for our plans, but we wanted to see how close we could make it to our goal of Camp Muir, which was 4.1 miles up from our starting point. Unfortunately, we did not reach our goal because of the weather but it was a blast anyways. Hopefully next time I’m in Seattle we can go for it again.

You can tell this photo was taken pretty early on because I’m still smiling and not wearing my hood yet.

Sunday

We took our time leaving the cabin by Mt. Rainier and drove to Bellevue for a visit to the Microsoft store where a couple of the Pragmatic Works guys bought the new Surface. Then we all returned our rental cars and made the light rail trip back into Seattle. After checking into our hotel we all ran up to the convention center and registered ourselves. I stayed with Brian this night to prepare for our precon the next day, while most of the others went to the penthouse they rented for the week, I would join them later.

Here’s a view from the penthouse.

Monday

Monday was the first day for Pre-Conference seminar, Brian and I were delivering ours on Implementing a BI Solution using SQL Server 2012. There was a lot of material to cover but we managed to do it and I think everyone really enjoyed the seminar. We presented using election data which was very topical seeing that the presidential election was on Tuesday.

Picture of our packed house during the seminar.

Tuesday

Tuesday I was free to be irresponsible so I woke up late (7:00 AM) and took my time heading to the Boeing facility in Everett, WA with Bradley Schacht and Chris Price. No picture taking allowed at the Boeing Factory, but I did get some nice souvenirs for my kids here.

Wednesday

Wednesday I had a very busy day. I went to the keynote, presented my session, worked our booth during the exhibitor expo and partied hard at the Hard Rock karaoke event.

The keynote had many great announcements including one I’ve been waiting to hear about: Multidimensional cubes working with Power View. There were other big announcements like Hekaton and Polybase.

After lunch I presenting my sessions on Adapting your ETL Solution to use SSIS 2012. I think the session went great. I had a lot of great questions that kept me pretty occupied after the session was over.

At night was the Exhibitor Expo where the Pragmatic Works booth held a book signing and gave away passes to our SQL Karaoke party that night. The Karaoke event at the Hard Rock Cafe was amazing with a live band and plenty of space to just chat and hang out if Karaoke isn’t your thing.

Here’s the line of people waiting to get a signed book.

SQL Karaoke at Hard Rock Cafe with a live band.

Thursday

This was my last day of presenting sessions. Unfortunately, I was the last session of the day and others had presented similar topics several times throughout the week so I only has about 30 or 40 attend. The session was on creating a Power View solution, where I showed how to create a model and Power View report as an end to end solution.

Friday

Friday I worked the Pragmatic Works booth all morning and headed down to Pike’s Place Market for some last minute sight seeing before our red-eye flight back.

It was a great week and I can’t wait for the BI Conference in Chicago.